ISACA refreshes best practices for IT shops

Enterprise IT departments can look to the new COBIT 5 framework for governance and management best practices, according to ISACA, a global nonprofit IT industry group.

IT OPERATIONS HEADACHES: Stupid tech support tricks: IT calls of shame

Along with improvements in risk management, businesses should find it easier to derive the most value from their IT investments through the use of COBIT 5. The co-chairman of the COBIT 5 task force, Derek Oliver, said in a statement that demand for the update is substantial.

“The advance interest in COBIT 5 has been overwhelming. It is clear that enterprises everywhere are aggressively seeking guidance on how to manage and ensure value from the growing mountain of information and increasingly complex technologies they are grappling with,” he said.

The organization also released the results of a member survey along with COBIT 5. According to ISACA, roughly three-quarters of those polled described IT investments as “very important” to their core mission, and 44% said they planned to selectively increase their IT spending sometime within the next year.

Moreover, ISACA said that its survey reveals a growing need for this type of overarching management framework. More than 40% of IT professionals surveyed, the group said, reported spending significant amounts of money on items with a low or unknown level of return on investment, and nearly half said that they experienced cost overruns on their projects.

One key to broad adoption of COBIT 5 could be the way it handles and provides guidance on the use of relatively new enterprise technologies like the cloud.

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World’s Infrastructure Management section.